Why Watching 'Digger' in VistaVision Could Change Your View of Tom Cruise's Box Office

Like 'One Battle After Another' and 'Bugonia,' Alejandro G. Iñárritu's latest provocative work was shot in the style of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite format. If you're lucky enough to live in one of the five cities screening it in VistaVision, you owe it to yourself and 'Digger' to experience it this way while you still can.

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Editor's Note: The following story contains spoilers for "Digger."

In the two and a half weeks since Alejandro J. Iñárritu's "The Digger" hit theaters, the film has acquired a mythic status that transcends and completely obliterates the film's actual content in the minds of most viewers. In keeping with the film's maximalist mood, the buzz surrounding it continues to reverberate in various directions, with defenders calling it a misguided masterpiece and detractors just as enthusiastically calling it a complete artistic disaster.

Even before the release of the film, the dipoles appeared. On the one hand, many speculated about Tom Cruise's brutal performance in the lead role as a brash and eccentric oil tycoon responsible for an environmental disaster. Early reports suggested that Cruise is back in "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Magnolia" mode, giving an ambitious and daring performance for an auteur filmmaker that could possibly earn him a fifth Oscar nomination. RELATED BOX OFFICE STORIES: "NAZA," a documentary about Israel's attacks on Gaza that has been a hit with distributors, passes the $500,000 bombs "The Social Reckoning" with a $5.5 million opening. Why did Aaron Sorkin's Facebook follow-up fail at Box Office?

Whether Cruise gets his (hugely deserved) Oscar nomination for the film or not, rumors of his big swing were confirmed just as audiences finally got to see "The Digger." So, unfortunately, the rumors that the film would be a financial bomb proved true: a big-budget experiment that's expected to open the least Tom Cruise star vehicle in more than 40 years.

The glee that some commentators reported about this was a little confusing to me. Even if you hate The Other, the conservatism its commercial failure encourages from studios can only be disappointing. (If you complain about too many sequels and movies based on IPs, but enjoy Iñárritu's failure, you're part of the problem.) Again, I was one of those viewers who was totally blown away by Iñárritu's bold, expansive vision and Cruise's fearless performance. I called the film a masterpiece when I wrote about it here, and the next two viewings only reinforced my position.

When the film opened, the backlash from all sides appeared so fast and furious that it was a little dizzying. Most critics either loved it or hated it, and were split right down the middle, with the Tomatometer score hovering around 50% since the film's release. (That division holds true here at IndieWire, where the film has both fans and haters, though I'll admit I'm probably the most effusive in my praise.)

On social media, the film caught fire in a way that belied its anemic box office.On X and Letterboxd, there was a lively, sweeping and often obnoxious debate over the film's merits, and the heat only intensified when Michael De Luca and Pam Abdi, the studio executives who greenlit "Digger," were fired by new boss David Ellison the week of the film's release. If you liked "The Digger," it was no longer just a good movie, but a symbol of everything the De Luca-Abdy risk-taking regime got right, and probably everything wrong with Skydance's takeover of Warners (a position reinforced by the announcement of Ellison's first two projects, the reboots of "G.I. Joe" and "T."

Warner Bros.' marketing department tried to turn the rift to its advantage, running promotions that included raves about the film from both traditional critics and social media. Pride didn't really work. Unfortunately, at this point it's clear that Hafar is going to be one of those movies, like Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, and Atesh Gharoor, whose disastrous box office results have made it synonymous with disaster.

Finally, both "Heaven's Gate" and "Ishtar" got the redemption they always deserved: Michael Cimino's wildly wild western entered the Criterion Collection, and Elaine May's equally nasty man-friend and Reagan administration foreign policy was embraced by a new generation of Reagan administrations. I don't think it's a coincidence that both of these films, Bonfire of the Pride and Digging, are overtly political films full of spiky ideas—the kind of failures that have something on their minds, always punished more severely than the more brazen capitalist enterprises that crash and burn like The Adventures of Pluto Nash or Sahara.

What's interesting about The Excavator — and this probably says more about the current media landscape and entertainment ecosystem than the film itself — is that decades of reappraisal of Heaven's Gate and Ishtar happened in a matter of days. "The Excavation" hadn't even been released, and revisionist reactions to negative reviews were already circulating. Within days of its release, the film became the highest rated and most talked about film on Letterboxd, even though most people saw it as a remake.

Much of the interest in "The Dig" has come from fetishist cinephiles, which is a little surprising to me that less has been made of VistaVision's contributions to the film. You can read a detailed explanation of the format here, but the standout thing about VistaVision is that it's a 35mm format that essentially doubles the size of the negative by running the film through a camera—and, in a real VistaVision exhibit, a projector—horizontally instead of vertically. After its initial glory days in the 1950s and 1960s, when directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford made some of their best films in this format, VistaVision disappeared as a mainstream medium for decades.

In recent years, however, directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson ("One Battle After Another") and Yorgos Lanthimos ("Bogonia") have embraced the format, highlighting its superior image quality. It's still rare and somewhat challenging to use, with only a handful of cameras in operation - one of which belongs to actor and cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. Ribisi lent his camera to Anderson and Iñárritu to "dig in," and Iñárritu and Cruz extolled VistaVision's virtues on their press tour, emphasizing the enhanced detail and depth of field of the enabled format.

Somehow, though, the fact that only a handful of theaters are playing "Digger" in true VistaVision hasn't been widely publicized the way Anderson did with "One Battle After Another." When that film was screened on VistaVision at Quentin Tarantino's Vista Theater in Los Angeles, Regal Union Square in New York and several other locations, it was considered a major event, as it meant that Anderson's film was the first to be shot and shown on VistaVision since Marlon Brando's 50 years ago.

At least five copies of VistaVision were printed for "Digger," but VistaVision interactions were far less common than those of "One Battle After Another." Even though "One Battle" was new, being the first, it's still a little odd that the answer is off, since VistaVision is the only way to actually see this movie shot on projected celluloid ("One Battle," on the other hand, offers several celluloid options).

It's also odd because VistaVision is the best way to see the movie if you're lucky enough to live in one of the five cities where "Digger" is currently playing — a beautiful, immersive presentation with more texture and subtlety than the digital IMAX interactions that represent the next best option.

Evidence of the "digging" claim was on display by discerning moviegoers when I caught an afternoon screening of VistaVision at the AMC Grove in Los Angeles this weekend. Although the film had reportedly slipped to No. 8 at the box office in its second week of release, my screening was nearly sold out — and so were most other VistaVision screenings this weekend. It gives me hope that "Digger" will remain on VistaVision for a few more weeks, but I'm not sleeping on it yet - if you live near the Grove, Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London, AMC Lincoln Square in New York, the Sun in Melbourne or Coolidge Corner in Boston, run to see "Digger" while you're still on Vista.

That's because the combined quality of celluloid exposure with enhanced resolution gives you the best of both worlds: the appealing nature and texture of film and the precise, granular accuracy of digital. I'd seen "Digger" twice before my third viewing in VistaVision, and this time I noticed details in the frame that simply looked different and better in VistaVision—colors were subtler, with more gradations across the palette, and production design minutiae showed up in dense sets in a way that wasn't even visible in digital IMAX.

What was most surprising, however, was how VistaVision served the performances. The format treats skin tones differently than digital IMAX, producing more warmth while also exhibiting a bluish-gray cast that extends the often cold cinematography. One might think that premium formats are all about epicness, but in this case—like the IMAX 70mm close-up of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer—the most stunning effects are in the intimate sequences, where the majesty and grace of Cruise's performance are most apparent.

In VistaVision, Cruise's strength comes less from his turn as Digger than from his turn as Curtis Markson, the beleaguered actor who plays another role in the play within the film. Others get sweeping poses and colorful lines, but Curtis is where Cruise really shows that he's one of our best actors and one of our sexiest movie stars. In VistaVision, the slightest movement of her eyes or the makeup around her lips shows the tension bubbling within the character. At certain moments, Cruise seems to act not through her makeup but with her makeup, using wrinkles and wisps of hair to convey sadness, resignation, worry, and anger with such subtlety that I still can't figure out exactly what she was doing or how she did it.

Cruise's VistaVision close-ups made me understand what Ingmar Bergman meant when he called the human face a landscape. There is something sadder and sadder about the performances and the film in general in this format. That's not to say that the epic spectacle of "The Excavation" — theatrical scenes, images of environmental destruction, etc. — wasn't made better by VistaVision. Indeed, this film represents the latest step in the evolution of epic filmmaking, continuing a trend Nolan began 18 years ago in the first bank heist sequence of The Dark Knight.

For the last 60 years or so, upscaling meant a wider frame - CinemaScope or Panavision or some similar process where the image was roughly twice as wide as the image height, maybe even wider. This was the norm, from classic Hollywood epics like "El Cid" and "King of Kings" to later adventure films like "Die Hard" and "Independence Day." As the first studio feature to use 70mm IMAX cameras with a 1.43:1 aspect ratio, The Dark Knight changed that, associating the epic with the long frame rather than the wide.

This made sense for several reasons, including that most multiplexes were not built to optimize CinemaScope releases. In recent decades, our box theaters have meant that the screen has gotten smaller, not bigger, to accommodate widescreen shows – instead of the screen growing to the left and right as intended, multiple locations have had to cover the top and bottom of the frame to maintain the original dimensions in theaters that weren't designed to accommodate them. Another feature film was not as immersive as Martin Scorsese described the biblical epics of his youth as "dresses." Instead, it became like watching TV with a bigger letterbox.

Nolan's take on IMAX fits perfectly with our new reality and ensures that maximum wall space is used in the theater. The likes of Quentin Tarantino may have shot The Hateful Eight in David Lean's beloved ultra-slim 70mm aspect ratio, but most of us live in Nolan's world now — and we did even before The Dark Knight. It's just that the filmmakers weren't savvy enough (and the studios weren't yet financially motivated by soon-to-be-inflated IMAX ticket prices) to make the new reality of narrower screening venues work for them.

Certainly, VistaVision's presentation of "Digger," shown in an IMAX-equivalent 1.5:1 aspect ratio, was a more immersive visual experience than what I'm used to at the Grove when I see something in a 1.85 or 2.40 cent aspect ratio. And even if you see "Digger" in IMAX, you're not guaranteed to see it in its proper form—only dual-laser-projection IMAX screens match the original image, while standard IMAX venues show the film in a 1.90:1 aspect ratio.

Tossing out all these numbers risks making The Digger into something other than what it is, making it more of a fetish for film geeks than a living, breathing work of art with humanity, ideas and style. The truth is, though, that seeing "Digger" on VistaVision isn't about flaunting your elitist credentials — it's about removing any barriers between you and Iñárritu's intentions, as the technology brings you closer to the film's emotional content, not further away.

Ultimately, The Digger is as much a film about faces as Bergman or John Cassavetes, and repeated viewings peel back the onion of the performances to reveal far more than the broad, whimsical Love caricatures the film seems to smuggle in on first viewing. "Dig" is seen not only several times, but in the right way. Not everyone will be able to see it the way Iñárritu intended, but if you have access to one of those five VistaVision theaters, there's really no other choice.